Race Into The Future With Bionic Boots

Check out these remarkable DIY boots that increase an ordinary person's speed to near Olympic levels.

(Bionic Boot)

Since he was a teenager, Keahi Seymour has admired the incredible speeds of the Ostrich and other land-dwelling two-legged creatures. With ostriches able to reach top speeds of up to 45 mph, Seymour was determined to unlock the secret to their quickness.

Many years and a dozen prototypes later, Seymour came to Maker Faire (Sept. 2014) to show off the latest version of his “bionic boot.” This prototype boosts his pace to a brisk 25 miles per hour, but Seymour won’t rest until he can take the human body to the next level, and outrun some of Earth’s fastest land animals.

In The Diamond Age, author Neal Stephenson creates a vivid picture of a future Shanghai. The novel mixes "futuristic" devices based on nanotechnology with simpler mechanical devices that are almost Victorian in their simplicity.

One of these devices is the pedomotive, a device for improving the speed of cops on the beat:

"A constable from the Shanghai police, legs strapped into a pedomotive, was coming down the street with the tremendous loping strides afforded by such devices... [more]